So a friend of mine got the advance copy of Black Crusade and my local gaming group have started a game, but one of the players wants to play as a Fallen Angel.

Well we are unsure of how exactly he should do this. What sort of special rules could we use to represent this?

Chaos Space Marine. Simple as that.

Remember, in 40k, the Space Marines are the twisted metal angel analogue just as the Emperor is the Jesus analogue and Horus is the Lucifer analogue. After all, in ancient times, half the host of God(-Emperor) did turn on Him and did seek to dethrone him and, low, they were cast out and down to gnash their teeth and spit for a thousand, or ten thousand years as the case may be.

I would imagine Chaos Spacemarine - Forsaken would be a great start for a Fallen.

Bassemandrh said:

What he said. The Forsaken career is meant for that sort of thing.

Also, you can allow him to have wings as a mutation.

That's certainly a cool idea - a flying Fallen. I am uncertain though how physically mutated a Fallen would be. To the limits of my knowledge, as a long time 40K player if anything, was that the Fallen were propelled through time by the Chaos gods after the destruction of Caliban, and that they haven't simply been mooching around for 10,000 years!

In terms of what that means with stats, you can certainly base them on a Chaos Space Marine profile, but because the corruption is inside, and therefore not always obvious (aside from the fact they are in black Dark Angels power armour, and are clearly not Ravenwing), you could incorporate rules from Deathwatch as well just as easily. Their former 'brother' marines in the Deathwing are on the hunt for them, and they are harder to root out simply because they look like a 'conventional' space marine.

Having said all of this I do not yet have Black Crusade - it may well be that you all know something I don't - so you'll have to bear with my level of general ignorance!

I haven't had too much of a look at black crusade, I like some of what I see but not all of it. Really though mechanics wise he doesn't have to be any different from any of the other chaos space marine characters except how he roleplays. As for being chucked through time he could have popped out ten years ago, ten minutes or ten centuries... hell the warp is fickle and from his point of view he's been plodding along for twelve thousand years but when he has been popping in and out of material space it's not necessarily in the right order. The nice part of black crusade is if he and the GM really think skill A) would be needed by a Fallen Angel then he can take it with the classless system. Unlike dark heresy and to a lesser extent rogue trader he's not going to be restricted by an advance scheme and need to take elite advances.

You're GM could go off and make a whole bunch of custom rules for his character but balancing this could be difficult to get exactly right leaving them over or under powered. Now they will be being hunted by Dark Angels sucessor chapters but the default setting is a bit off the beaten path so they might attract attention and might not. Certainly it's be great for an adventure having the group being hounded by loyalist astrates who seem to be willing to follow them anywhere, will the Fallen keep his allies in the dark or let them in on the secret? If the player intends to not be running around loyal to chaos so much as in it for himself or knowing he can't go back home then he should avoid getting involved with any one god, though this may be awkward at times.

If ye end up really wanting to make special rules considering holding back on the fallen character until the group gets to a higher xp level and have him just play an evil Dark Angel character from Deathwatch running around in Maximus for example. Trying to bring stuff over from deathwatch and give it to a Black Crusade character should require some kind of negatives to balance out bonuses, and having Enemy: Dark Angels might not be exactly fair because they're unlikely to only try and kill him when they hunt down the PCs warband.

One of the normal chaos space marine classes should work with an appropriate background requiring little to no tweaking in my mind. If he's trying to play a bit of an antihero who isn't throwing in his lot with chaos well that'll be awkward but doable, particularily if some members of the party want to be particularily devout to their god but thats his problem to solve through violence, cunning or violent cunning.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I suppose we were over thinking the problem. Though now I am interested in the whole Flying Fallen thing.